Darkness Undone: A Novel of the Marked Souls (31 page)

They’d agreed Sid’s posh accent would earn him a pass with an expensive collared shirt, rumpled just enough to imply a certain carelessness with his money. But later, when Alyce came down the steps of the YMCA in a white cocktail dress, one shoulder bared and a thin white scarf trailing around her throat, he wanted a tuxedo—and a limo, maybe with a hot tub, and an evening that didn’t include unrelenting evil.

He gestured at her white ballet flats. “No boots?”

“My black ones clashed.”

Since he couldn’t drag his gaze off her, he supposed she knew what she was doing. Certainly Bookkeeper tradition didn’t cover uniforms for possible suicide missions.

Maybe they knew basic talya black covered all occasions.

He held his arm out to her. “You look beautiful.”

Beyond beautiful. In her pure white, her hair braided in a dark corona, she gleamed against the muddy fall hues of the city—fall, as he had fallen.

He gave himself a shake. Not fallen so much as pushed by the demon. The urges of the
symballein
bond just honed the edge of the stairs he was currently tumbling down.

When her fingers settled lightly on his sleeve, the touch vibrated through his bones, and he struggled to keep his voice even. “No coat?”

“I didn’t want to ruin it.”

She shivered, just an infinitesimal quiver, and he drew her under his arm. “I thought you said you didn’t feel the cold.”

“I don’t. At least, I didn’t.”

“I think removing the angelic relic from your body is allowing the human and demon energies to finally come into balance, as they should have been all along. You’ll
probably notice more changes—hopefully all good—as the resonance aligns.”

“Maybe.” She gazed up at him. “Mostly I feel cold when I’m with you.”

He frowned and started to pull away. “I’m sorry.”

“No.” She caught him before he’d gone far. “I feel warm and good
with
you. The sunshine is brighter. But I feel the cold too. I had forgotten, and now I remember.”

The thought froze him for a moment, as if all the cold she’d forgotten had been pumped through his veins. That was a duty to the
symballein
bond he hadn’t contemplated. The demon that fit itself to the flaws in a human soul offered immortality, strength, quickness, improved sensory acuity, and a remarkable affinity for anything sharp, pointy, heavy and/or plain old deadly. It didn’t make the sunlit world shiny.

The only thing that could do that, if he remembered his popular rock’n’roll ballads correctly, was love.

Alyce loved him.

Of course, the
symballein
bond implied a certain intimate working relationship, what with balancing the broken shards of each other’s souls—and having sex.

How had he forgotten the element of love?

As a secretly aspiring Bookkeeper, he’d memorized the periodic table of the elements before he’d had his first wet dream. Then he’d seen a video of the
Hindenburg
—watched in gut-curdling horror as fire ate the world’s largest airship to a smoldering skeleton—and learned how there was so much more to that first innocuous element, hydrogen, than a single tidy square, even with the atomic number, could explain.

Looking into Alyce’s eyes, he realized love was apparently like hydrogen.

The first element. Simple. All-encompassing. And violently, dangerously explosive.

What could he say? “I don’t want you to be cold.”

How inanely beside the point.

A yellow cab honked as it passed another car, and he eagerly stepped past her to raise his hand. “I’ll ask the driver to turn up the heat,” he promised her as the cab pulled to the curb.

“Don’t bother.” She slipped past him when he held open the back door and settled herself. She patted the seat beside her and cast him a look with violet flames smoldering under the ice. “I have you.”

Suddenly, demonic possession, the rise of a djinn army, and gaping doorways into hell seemed the least of his worries.

On the ride to the dock where the
River Princess
waited, Sidney was quiet, but Alyce didn’t pester him. He was probably working out a way to get onto the boat, get all his answers, and get off without needing her questionable swimming skills.

Best to leave him to his thinking, because she wanted to keep the dress dry and silky smooth so he could tease it from her later.

She’d felt his interest while they floated in the pool. And then she’d
really
felt his interest when she’d wrapped herself around him. That had been inappropriate on her part, the sort of behavior her old master would have been entirely justified in calling temptation.

But the sight of his strong, nearly bare body had tempted her first, and his gentle hold on her shoulders had stripped whatever restraint she might have considered.

Another shiver went through her—memory of how gently he’d stripped her in bed—but she stopped herself from touching him and distracting him from his thoughts.

Time enough for that later.

The cab dropped them off amidst a flow of sleek and satisfied people reeking of alcohol. Soft music piped from the bars lining the river. Sidney steered through the crowd, polite, but clearing a way for her to the gangplank. Small tea lights lined the walkway out to the boat, and a yellow spotlight illuminated the name at the prow, but the rest of the boat was dark. The bowed and tinted windows reflected warped images of the activity onshore without a clue of what happened within.

A small group had just crossed into the boat as they made their way closer. Another man stood at the foot of the gangplank, thick arms crossed in plain disinvitation. As they approached, he stepped to block the path onto the boat.

Sidney waved one hand with a touch of exasperation. “Was I supposed to bring a bottle of champagne to crack over the bow?”

“That’s only when launching a ship for the first time, sir,” the man said.

“Well, it is my first time.” Sidney laughed, a touch too loud. “That explains the wine I’ve had.” He waggled his fingers at Alyce, so she sidled up under his arm. “Hey, luv, did you call ahead?”

She shrugged one shoulder. She made sure it was the bare shoulder. “I forgot.”

“Of course you did, luv. Which is why I hold the money.” Sidney pulled out his wallet and fanned out a handful of bills. “That should do it.”

“Sir, I’m afraid we can’t—”

“I’m always afraid too.” Alyce lowered her tone into demonic range as her teshuva responded to the nebulous fears circling the man and twisted his worries back to him. “Thorne likes you that way.”

While the man gaped at her, Sidney freed another few bills and stuffed them in the other man’s shirt pocket.
“Nothing to worry about, right, old chap?” He patted the bulging shirt pocket hard enough to nudge the man aside. “I see they’re casting off the lines. You should watch out.”

He tugged her down the gangplank before the man could protest again.

“Won’t he come after us?”

“To watch an annoyingly drunk Brit lose his money at the tables and his mind over a vision in white?” He smiled at her, a little crookedly.

She bit her lip. “Is it too late to think maybe this is one of the bad kinds of ideas?”

“Quick, quiet recon,” he reminded her. “Thorne obviously has a very comfortable setup here. He won’t sacrifice that for mere pesky talyan.”

His logic made sense. She found that comforting, although it would have been more comforting if her teshuva hadn’t felt so small in her, withdrawn to the very depths of her being, almost lost to her senses.

She felt alone. She felt … human.

They stepped onto the smooth, dark deck. Beside her, Sidney looked so at ease, the rich russet waves of his hair ruffled and his sleeves rolled back in defiance of the October chill. She slipped her hand into his.

He looked down at her with a faint smile. “Yet another strange date.”

“I’d go anywhere with you.”

His smile flickered out. “Well, let’s at least go inside the cabin where you won’t freeze.”

She snuggled up against him as they walked. He’d remembered that she’d said she felt the cold, felt everything, when she was with him. The thought warmed her from the inside, even more than the heat of his body beside her.

Yet he felt stiff against her shoulder. Probably he was more worried than he wanted her to know. To reassure him, she gazed up at him, focusing all her belief in her eyes, and squeezed his hand.

His answering smile looked a little seasick.

Inside, subtle pools of lights flowed around high tables, gleaming on the mellow woods. A handful of women circled with trays of glasses as tall, thin, and white-gold as the servers themselves.

Sidney snagged a glass and held it out to Alyce. “Champagne?”

When she lifted the fizzing contents, she sneezed, and her demon uncoiled a notch. “To drink?”

“Remember when I explained to you about cocktail parties?”

“The men drink too much and the women wear pretty dresses.” She smoothed her hand down her thigh. “But not much fun, you said.”

“And that was before a demon-revved metabolism made it impossible to drink too much. Still, a glass or two will help us blend in.”

“And if I break off the cup, the stem is long and sharp enough to be a weapon.”

“That too.” He stepped away. “It looks like there’s more room belowdecks; that’s where I’d keep the big games. And private rooms. Let’s look around up top until we sail.”

The upper level was smaller, with intimate low seating and even lower, more intimate music piping through the walls. Several couples already occupied the forward seats, so Sidney guided her to the back with a hand at the base of her spine.

Through the thin fabric of her dress, his hand warmed her. The silky stuff moved under his fingers so his palm shifted in slow circles over her spine. She wanted to dump the glass and return the caress, but that wasn’t their mission.

So instead, she took a sip and sneezed again. The demon spiraled higher as the dark heat of Sidney’s hand and the sparkling coolness of the champagne met deep in her belly in some sinful alchemy.

She liked it. It made her legs steadier while the boat, pulling away from the dock, rocked under her.

As they glided out to the lake, she drained the rest of the glass and set it aside, though close enough to grab if she did need a weapon. But now that her hands were free …

She threaded her fingers through his and tugged him to the back of the room. The lights of the diminishing city glittered through the tinted windows, casting highlights in place of shadow. Still, she could not read his eyes.

But the champagne made that seem unnecessary. Her demon flickered unsteadily, and her senses shimmered like the city lights. She drew their clasped hands down the outsides of her thighs, framing their embrace.

“Kiss me,” she whispered. “It will help us blend in.”

He frowned. “I should have guessed your teshuva might not process alcohol as thoroughly as a stronger demon.”

“I am okay.” She was coming to like that word, almost as much as she liked champagne.

The boat tilted a little—or maybe that was just her—so she took the opportunity to pull herself closer to him. The silky scarf around her neck chafed at her sensitized skin, a reminder how there’d been almost nothing between them in the pool—and nothing at all between them in bed.

She tilted a bit more, angling against his chest, and gazed up at his mouth, so far away. If he was as tall as the other talyan, she wouldn’t be even this close. Still, the unyielding stiffness of his spine held him apart, though the thud of his heart rocked the whole world.

Again, maybe that was just her.

“Kiss me,” she urged, “so I don’t forget.”

“Alyce …” Her name surfaced from someplace in him deeper and darker than the lake around them. He pulled her closer—not that there was much closer to be had. His fingers, still tangled through hers, pinned her hands at the small of her back.

When his lips swept hers in a hot wave, she moaned and
arched into him. The stiffness that had gone out of his spine reappeared elsewhere, and she reveled in the sweet heat that swelled through her in answer.

She would happily forget the world if she could stay in his arms forever. …

Abruptly, Sidney brought their hands together in front of them again, between their bellies, forcing them apart but putting them both within reach of some even more likable places. “Alyce, wait. I know the
symballein
bond has resulted in some metaphysiological connectivity that may inspire feelings in you of—”

“Feelings like making love?”

He swallowed, and he looked as if he might sneeze even though he hadn’t had any champagne. “For example.”

She nodded. “It is a nice feeling, isn’t it? As though all is good with the world.”

Despite the soft sway of the boat, unlike her own soft swaying, he went utterly still. “After everything …
with
everything, how can you say that?”

“Because I’m with you.”

If she’d driven the words through his heart on the stiletto of a broken champagne glass, Sid would not have been more shocked.

Oh, he’d guessed—maybe even
said
to himself in the privacy of his own head—she was feeling something for him. But most people were too careful to expose themselves with such vulnerability, to say what they felt without a defense, without a fail-safe. The weakness of her demon and the loss of its talisman somewhere in the centuries had left her without those. Now the truth was clear; this was not a bonding he could observe safely from a distance—or even up close with asbestos gloves and a polycarbonate face shield. At the bright gleam in her eyes, his thoughts went instead to vastly more personal protection.

Was his heart trying to get away … or get to her?

Despite all his studies, he didn’t have an answer, so he did what any good researcher would do.

He took a step back. Their linked hands stretched between them awkwardly.

“It’s hard to say what we’re feeling,” he started.

Her steady gaze pinned him like a petrified insect to corkboard. Even though he was a scientist, those had always seemed sinister. “It’s not. Don’t use so many words.”