Darkness Undone: A Novel of the Marked Souls (13 page)

“Oh, it’s burning,” Alyce murmured. Her gaze felt melted to the sword, and she couldn’t look away. Each flicker sent a wave of weakness through her knees, like a fever making her sway, though her pulse raced fast enough to leave without her.

Nanette stepped to one side, patting the air as if trying to extinguish something on fire—tempers, at least, if not the sword. “Everyone, please, calm down. We’re all friends here.”

Sidney stepped between Alyce and the sword. “Actually, Nanette, only you are listed as friend in the archives.” He jerked his chin at Fane. “You have a question mark by your name.”

Fane wrinkled his lip. “A question mark? I’m hurt.”

Sera lifted one shoulder as she made her knife disappear into her sleeve. “Not a big black question mark. A penciled one.”

“Allies at least,” Nanette said hurriedly.

Fane’s sneer twisted his face into harsh, uneven lines. “Allies wouldn’t break the concord that has held us to our vows for aeons—”

“Well, you can’t execute them here tonight,” Nanette interrupted. “My husband will be here to let the chorus in for practice in less than an hour.” She flattened her palms, hand over hand over the pink heart, her gaze on Sera beseeching. “Mr. Fane came after I talked to you. I didn’t know—”

“I came when I heard you all were coming.” Fane kept his sword at a threatening angle toward the talyan.

Archer mirrored his menace with axe poised perpendicularly to the sword. “The sphericanum bugs phones?”

“‘Bug’ is such a lower-realm word.” After another moment, the point of Fane’s sword dipped aside. “But I’ve heard the chorus. God knows they need the practice.”

With a negligent flick of his wrist, as if he’d intended to get around to it eventually and had just been distracted, Archer collapsed the fanned blades of his axe.

Nanette stepped forward, her gaze on Alyce as soft as spring grass. “You aren’t like the other talyan.”

“My demon is faint,” Alyce said. Not so faint that it didn’t compel her to take a wary step back, careless of the hitch in her gait that had brought them here. The golden glare of the angelic energy blinded her and lengthened the shadows behind it. Anything could be hiding there. The ever-watchful devil danced along her nerves, with all the grace she lacked, and a protest burst from her. “They’re coming.”

Sidney’s hand closed on her shoulder and made her realize how hard she was shaking. “Just Nanette. She needs to get close enough for a quick look.”

A haze of gold threaded between Nanette’s fingers like a cat’s cradle. “Weaker than my angel even. Blocked somehow.”

“Blocked?” Sidney frowned.

“It’s not a technical term,” Nanette murmured. “It’s about feeling.”

Sidney crossed his arms, his jaw set off kilter. “I can’t fix her with a feeling.”

Archer rumbled something low under his breath that made Sera utter a laugh, even lower and more breathy.

The private pleasure in the sound tore through Alyce. She’d rather face all the sharpened weapons in the room at once, but even as the demon urged her away, she raised her gaze to Sidney’s. He watched her over the upper rims of his spectacles, looking every bit as desperate to leave.

And as dreadfully bound.

“You don’t understand,” she whispered.

“I want to—” Whatever else he’d been about to say shattered in a spray of breaking glass.

Alyce whirled toward the front doors. The teshuva jerked up her arm in front of her face to catch the brunt of stinging shards, borne farther than any blow should have propelled them.

The belling wave of demonic energy—so strong the blue and gold slivers hung suspended in the clotted air—almost buckled her knees.

Fighting the teshuva’s hold, she spun back to Sidney. “Run!”

But the seven devil-men who strode through the splintered doors had other ideas.

Sid grabbed for Alyce, but her sleeve slipped through his fingers. Running
into
the fray. Bloody hell, he’d already done this once.

Trapped in the gravitational pull of her slight form, he took a step after her, but Archer’s big body knocked him sideways. Sera, a stride behind, jolted him the other way. He stumbled and fell to one knee. Fane at least had the decency to vault over him.

Nanette hauled him upright, wrenching his shoulder, and he bit back another curse. “We have to get out of here.”

“Not this time.” He raced past her to the fire extinguisher halfway down the hall. He’d noticed it hanging next to Fane’s head in case somebody needed to knock the smug angelic warden unconscious.

His shoulder protested more sharply when he ripped the red canister from its mooring. He didn’t have time to read whether it was a Class A or C extinguisher. It certainly wasn’t Class D for demons, but at least it could be used at a distance. He wasn’t stupid enough to think he’d be much help in close quarters, except maybe as a distraction.

As quick as he’d been, the talyan and warden were
quicker. When he returned to the foyer, Archer, Sera, and Fane bumped elbows in a barricade of bristling fury and swinging steel against the invaders.

But beyond them, the djinn-men were a wall of unrelieved gloom.

Viewed straight on, they looked—except for their medieval array of swords, staves, and one sickle—like common thugs in dark jeans and black hoodies. But when Sid glanced around wildly for Alyce, twists of poison-yellow fog smeared the edges of his vision.

She charged past with one of the decorative flags wielded like a spear in her hands; a flimsy fiberglass spear trailing a vinyl sunflower.

The intruder with the long-handled sickle grinned when she barreled toward him. He spread his arms wide, free hand tilted palm up in a ya-kidding-me gesture.

He coughed out a laugh like a lungful of unfiltered cigarette smoke. “You’re making this too easy,
heshuka
.”

Sid didn’t bother wondering what the djinn-man meant. He yanked the pin on top of the extinguisher and clamped down on the trigger until metal grated on metal.

The cylinder kicked hard in his grip. He aimed the cloud of white powder high for the djinn-man’s malicious grin, thinking he’d at least trigger a blink. Instead, the powder hit the leading edge of the djinni’s powerful aura—and clung like a smothering blanket.

The djinn-man shouted and swung his sickle through the fog, but the floating particles closed seamlessly behind the blade.

Alyce ducked the blind swing and darted in low. She thrust her flag spear upward with both hands. The djinn-man screamed, and his demon’s etheric energy stained the cloud with sparks of yellow lighting. The
reven
around Alyce’s neck shimmered violet as if in answer, and she jammed the spear deeper until scarlet streamed through the white fog.

Sid eyed the amplitude differences between the djinni’s lightning and the teshuva’s twinkle. Alyce’s demon just didn’t have the power to match, overcome, and absorb the other demon, so she wouldn’t be able to kill the djinn-man. She’d at best made him unholy pissed.

The last spray of powder cleared the nozzle, and the extinguisher sputtered out in his hands. The sickle came swinging down through the thinning fog, on a collision course with Alyce’s exposed spine.

Sid leapt forward, choking on the hanging particles. “Sera! Archer!” He thrust the empty cylinder ahead of him.

The sickle clanged into the metal and sliced halfway through. As the remaining gas in the extinguisher whistled out, the djinn-man loomed from the cloud, his eyes flaming yellow. Alyce’s spear had pierced below his rib cage and emerged in a wreck behind his collarbone. His hiss of rage was even more demonic with the bloody spittle that dribbled from the corner of his mouth.

He hauled on the sickle, but the blade was trapped by the jagged gash in the canister. Sid clutched the extinguisher, muscles locked against the djinn-man’s strength.

“Out of the way!” Fane lunged toward them. With his sword arced high over his head, his white shirt drew taut, revealing spatters of crimson and no corresponding holes.

The djinn-man keened, an inhuman sound, and the yellow afterimage of his djinni hovered in a funnel around him as if seeking to escape. In the demon’s distraction, his wounds pulsed fresh blood.

Sid heaved the fire extinguisher, so hard the stitches in his shoulder popped audibly. But the djinn-man staggered, and Sid tackled Alyce, both of them falling to their knees just as Fane’s sword swooped by them.

The blow missed them all by a hand span.

And still the djinn-man shrieked across multiple octaves. He staggered back, reaching not for the spear through his torso nor to ward off Fane’s second X-marks-the-spot
swing. Instead, the djinn-man raked his fingers through the fleeing miasma of his demon.

He’d have had more luck catching smog out of a tailpipe. The djinni tore itself free from the man. For a heartbeat, the two were superimposed.

Fane thrust once more, and this time the blow pierced both demon and man.

Another screech, unfettered by the human throat, ripped through the church. Alyce cried out and tucked against Sid’s chest as the shock wave of ether blasted past them. He held her tight, wishing he could make himself bigger by force of will to cover every millimeter of her. Whatever force destroyed the djinni, he couldn’t risk letting the backlash touch her.

The intruder, human again without his demon, sagged on the point of Fane’s sword. The faintest line scored the warden’s forehead between his eyes as he yanked his weapon free.

Sid pulled himself to his feet, hauling Alyce behind him, to finally do as Nanette had suggested and get the hell away.

The djinn-men had obviously come to the same conclusion. Two lay incapacitated on the floor at Archer’s feet, and Fane’s hallowed sword swept hungrily through them in twinned screams. But the other four pounded toward the door.

The one in the rear paused to slam the butt of his trident against the mosaic in the doorway. The blue and gold tiles fountained around him.

“Next time,” he shouted.

He and his brethren vanished, leaving the low sun to shine through the broken door across the devastation.

Archer pursued but skidded to a halt amidst scattered glass and tiles, his cursing drowned out by the squeal of tires. “Next time?” He whirled his bloody-edged axe at the nearest innocent wall, but he hauled up short when Sera snapped his name.

Nanette crept from the hallway where she’d taken shelter. “Mr. Fane? Cyril? Are you hurt?”

From his hunched stance over his sword, Fane straightened abruptly. “They didn’t touch me.” His glance at the talyan was scathing. “You demon-ridden are fine, of course.”

Sid touched Alyce’s trembling shoulder and clenched his jaw to keep from reminding the warden that beneath their demonic overlays, the talyan were as fragile as any of them. “What the hell was that about?”

Sera toed the withering corpse nearest her. Without djinni energy to hold the years since possession at bay, time was rapidly reducing flesh to bone and bone to brittle shards. The bloodstains had already turned to dust. “They’ve never come at us before.”

Sickle-man’s body caved in with a soft, stinking sigh. Fane’s lip curled in disgust. “Have you forgotten Corvus Valerius already?”

“He was alone,” Sid pointed out. “And two thousand years of possession had made him insane. This”—he spread his fingers at the corpses—“was calculated.”

Archer bumped the axe restlessly against his shoulder as he returned to their little circle. “Not so special. We’ve seen feralis packs ever since that damn Bookie weakened the Veil and brought through the demon that possessed Sera.”

Sera rolled her eyes at Sid. “I tell you, chick talyan and nosy Bookkeepers really put a hitch in the league get-along.”

Archer tangled his fingers in the chain around her neck and reeled her closer. The stone in his ring reflected the same coruscating whorls as the pendant at the end of the chain. “You know I’d go through hell for you, love. Because I
have
gone through hell for you.” As if having her close made the axe redundant, he collapsed the sheaved blades and tucked the weapon into the fold of his coat. “The horde gathering is old news. Corvus even kept his own collections of lesser tenebrae.”

“We’re not talking about the lesser demons,” Nanette pointed out. “Corvus, by himself, opened a doorway into hell. Imagine all of them against us. That hasn’t happened since the First Battle.”

Out on the freeway, an ambulance wailed, on its way to or from a siren-worthy accident. Though its haste implied there was still hope for someone, somewhere, by the time the sound reached them, the timbre had shifted, like waves through distorted glass, with overtones of malignancy.

Alyce whispered, “What was the First Battle?”

“When the traitors were tossed out of the divine realm,” Fane said. “When hell was born.”

“Oh. That’s bad.”

Talyan and angel-touched looked at her disbelievingly. She ducked a little farther behind Sid.

He gave a decisive nod. “It
is
bad. By definition, the djinn don’t gather for good.”

“It’s been to our advantage that evil hasn’t played nice with others,” Fane said. “Even other evils. If that’s changing …”

“That’s bad,” Nanette and Alyce chorused.

“As bad as the stench in here,” Fane agreed. “How convenient I have body bags in my van.”

“Certain advantages to owning a disaster restoration business,” Archer muttered.

As they headed down the hall toward the back exit, Sera peered into the darkened rooms. “What could they have wanted?” She cast an apologetic glance at Nanette. “There’s just not much here except you. And an intermittent healing touch isn’t much use to a demon-possessed immortal.”

Archer snorted. “Maybe they wanted a flaming sword of their very own.”

At the back door, Fane held up one hand, stopping them all in their tracks. “Speaking of swords. Just in case …”

Sid tightened his fists as Archer, Sera, and Fane all drew steel. Why hadn’t he grabbed the djinn-man’s sickle? Other than because he’d be worse than useless with it, of course.

Nanette fished in the front pocket of her jumper. “Daniel makes me lock up when I’m here alone. Here’s the key—”