Darkness Undone: A Novel of the Marked Souls (39 page)

And he thought he could call himself a talya male? He just didn’t have the height, the weight, or the guts for it.

At least he had the brooding thing down.

He was silent as he climbed behind Alyce into one of the waiting cars. Baird jangled his keys, and Amiri took the front seat. They flowed into the exodus.

After a few blocks, Amiri cleared his throat. “Isn’t it nice it’s not raining anymore?”

Oh God, they were going to talk about the weather?

Sid jittered the cell in his palm and slanted a glance at Alyce, keeping his gaze elevated from the hand span of white skin above the leather bodice. “You know how to use your phone?”

She nodded. “Nim showed me earlier.”

No doubt Nim had done a thorough job while tarting her up. He stuffed the cell into his coat. “Do you have it with you?”

She gave him a level look. “I have pockets.”

Where? He almost asked, but then he might reveal that he couldn’t believe those fitted black leather trousers had room for pockets. But he’d also be revealing his disapproval because the trousers—another hand-me-down, obviously, tucked into the tops of her boots—weren’t
that
snug. Just fitted enough to provide a stark outline for her slender hips, just tight enough to make him think about what was inside.

Okay, he had apparently mastered talya brooding and now lusting. And he had room for plenty more sins where those had come from since
he
wasn’t wearing skintight leather.

“We’re supposed to hunt the blocks south and east of Wacker, outside the park.” Amiri glanced over the seat. “Boss-man said those are your stomping grounds, Alyce. Any thoughts on where to start?”

She blinked at him, surprise softening her mouth. “I’m not sure.”

“Maybe the underground garage off Michigan Ave,” Baird suggested. “It’s dark and spooky, perfect for tenebrae.”

Alyce shook her head. “We don’t want a few malice. We want Thorne. And if I know him …” She slid a glance sideways, and Sid forced himself to unclench his fist. “He’ll be mourning the
River Princess
, so he’ll stay near the water, along the river or by the lake.”

Baird clicked his tongue. “We’ll cross the river at Dearborn and find a place to park. You two walk west along Wacker and double back at the Franklin Bridge. We’ll go east and circle round on Lake Shore. Call if you see anything, and we’ll come running.”

“Likewise,” Sid said curtly.

Finding a parking spot on a busy night downtown was enough to spawn a few negative-energy malice. Baird grumbled at a cute little family dawdling in the crosswalk with an infant in a stroller and a straggling toddler.

Amiri punched his shoulder. “They’re why we’re still here.”

“And they’ll never know it.” Baird tightened his hands on the steering wheel. “They’d at least look up if I nudged them.”

Amiri punched him harder.

Alyce sat forward in her seat. “Go around the block. I know a place where we can leave the car.”

There was an open parking spot, but only because no one would be foolish enough to leave a car in the narrow, dark alley.

Amiri peered around. “Will it still be here when we get back?”

“Will it matter much if it’s not?” Sid got out and shut the door—not hard, yet he still knocked off a few flakes of rust. “Trust me—no one wants this car.”

“Jilly gets very sarcastic when we squander resources,” Amiri said. “You’ve never had to listen to her ‘kids in China would be happy’ speech at her vegetarian dinners.”

Alyce was already at the mouth of the alley, her slender black-clad frame outlined against the wet shine of the street and the headlights of passing traffic. “Speaking of dinner, I smell birnenston. Let’s go.”

They crossed the bridge according to their plan and separated. Sidney looked back over his shoulder at the other two men walking off. Alyce folded her arms across her stomach. Clearly he didn’t want to be alone with her.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “If we run into anything, we can call them back.”

“I doubt we’ll need to. Chances are, we won’t find Thorne first.”

Oh well then, if statistically he wasn’t worried about her weak teshuva leaving him with no one to defend his back … He just didn’t want to be with
her
.

“I’ll walk the north side of the river,” she said. “If you walk the south side at the same time, we’ll cover twice the ground.”

“No. We stay together.”

“The
symballein
bond?”

His jaw worked so hard, she thought he would chew through whatever held him back from speaking. She wished he would, so he would speak without thinking. Then she might hear what he felt instead of what he thought he should say.

He turned and walked away. “It’s too cold to stand still. And we’re supposed to be stalking something.”

She lingered a half step behind. Another couple passed them, walking in the other direction, arms linked, and admiring the view of the river and the city and each other. She stifled her jealousy. Under different circumstances, she and Sidney might have been such a couple. Without the fate of good and evil, the
symballein
chains …

No, that was a delusion, and she was done with those. Under different, nondemonic circumstances, Sidney would be with someone named Maureen and she herself would be nothing—not even a memory.

“We’re almost opposites, your demon and mine,” he said abruptly.

The headlights from the passing cars cast hard shadows across the even harder lines of his mouth. She’d done that to him—she and the demon. Her fingers curled, as if she could recapture the softness of his lips.

“Mine to crave, and yours, craven, to fear.” He stopped. “But you’re never afraid. So actually, I’m wrong again.”

“Sidney …”

“And I said I wanted to study the
symballein
bond.” He shook his head. “A terrible Bookkeeper conceit, to think I
could understand what it means to be that closely entwined with someone else.”

She put her hand to her throat. If only the lack of emotion were infectious, like a birnenston that burned away every nerve ending so she’d never feeling anything again.

“I understand if you hate me now.” His lips quirked without humor. “I can see very clearly how you would, because I hate myself.”

“Don’t. You didn’t ask for my love.” She was grateful the tight laces of the bustier kept her spine straight and her shoulders back. “I’m the one who didn’t know how it works.”

“How it works? Love doesn’t have a methodology. Which is why Bookkeepers can’t do love.”

Apparently her emotions did still work—unfortunately—because the word felt as if all six delicate knives along her back had been driven into her heart at once. She dredged up a wan smile. “Maybe you should write a handbook for
symballein
pairs.”

“At least the ‘how-not-to.’” His hands twitched as if he’d been about to reach out to her, but he just made fists at his sides. “Alyce—”

His cell phone rang with the urgent call of a hoot owl.

She turned away, but he ignored the call. “Alyce, I would rather have died than hurt you.”

Then her phone rang like a church bell. She answered.

“We found Thorne.” Jonah’s voice was curt, flat, and all the more terrifying because of it. “He’s calling tenebrae through the verge. In the middle of a Halloween parade.”

As he and Alyce raced back to the car, Sid cursed himself with every bootfall.

He’d officially failed at everything he’d come to Chicago to do. Finish his Bookkeeper training? The teshuva had derailed him, and he’d become a novice talya. Analyze the consequences of the
symballein
attachment? Alyce had sent him one icy-eyed glance, and he’d lost all objectivity in the bond. Determine the nature of the tenebraternum verge?

Now Thorne had beaten him to the punch.

Punching something had never sounded so good.

Baird and Amiri were pounding back from the other direction. Baird slid across the hood in fine action-hero form and had the engine started before the rest of them had piled in. He sent the car squealing out of the alley in a bumper-thumping bottom-out that left sparks in their wake.

It was a quick ride down Wacker to the pier, faster still with Baird at the wheel. It would have been even quicker if not for the milling crowd meandering across the streets between
the little fountain green space that marked the entrance to the pier and the parking area.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” Baird growled as the traffic cop whistled at him and held out a hand to stop the car. A veritable herd of costumed children scampered in front of the car—half of them leaving, half just arriving—the princesses and miniature comic book characters in sugar-fueled accord with the little horned devils and rubber-faced monsters.

The marquee over the pier announced
COSTUME PARADE AND TREASURE HUNT. PAINT A PUMPKIN
!

“Oktoberfest,” Baird said. “It’s all craft beer and Halloween masks—perfect for talyan.”

Alyce craned her neck to peer out the window. “With a midway carnival. Thorne likes games of chance.”

“A djinn-man who plays ringtoss for a chance to win goldfish …” Sid shook his head.

“The place is crawling with people,” Amiri said.

“I’m sure there will be enough pumpkins for everyone,” Sid said. “Whether there will be a parking spot, however …”

Alyce’s fingers dug into the back of the car seat. “If the tenebrae come forth, with all these children around … We can’t let them see. They don’t deserve to know evil.” Her face was drawn, her gaze stark without a trace of bracing violet.

Sid eased her hand from the tears she was making in the cheap vinyl and laced his fingers through hers. “We won’t let them see anything. The only nightmares they’ll have tonight will be of high fructose corn syrup.”

Her grasp tightened. “You can’t say that, not for certain.”

He looked at her without blinking. “I just did.”

After a moment, her death grip eased, and she nodded.

Then she turned, opened the car door, and bailed out.

Sid choked on a curse and scrambled after her. “Baird, ditch the car and find us.”

“Right behind you,” Amiri said.

They raced for the diner at the end of the pier.

The amusement park was packed, with the Ferris wheel and the miniature golf course at full capacity, the carousel’s calliope tune a cheerful counterpoint to the screams of the children on the Tilt-A-Whirl with their manufactured fear of being flung violently into space.

“This is bad,” Amiri said as they dodged the crowds. “Really bad. Last time we knocked big holes in Navy Pier, there was no one here.”

Sid glanced back over his shoulder at the six-story Crystal Gardens that glittered behind the park. The shine of the amusement park lights, distorted on the atrium windows, worried him. “If Thorne calls through the tenebraternum, the raw demonic emanations will subvert the glass and metal of the atrium: a larger version of Corvus’s soul bomb. The verge could expand to several hundred times its current size.”

Amiri took a stumbling step, and Alyce stared at Sid in horror.

“Maybe you could hold off on the good news until we’re surrounded by pure evil,” Amiri suggested.

Sid shrugged. “Consider it a motivational speech.”

Amiri let out a bark of laughter. “You are finally talya.”

Sid didn’t slow, though the pronouncement rattled him.

He was talya. He had the demon to prove it. Now he just had to prove it to himself.

They skidded up outside the diner.

And halted, nonplussed. There was a line to get in.

A young man in a starched apron offered a tray of toothpicked meatballs. “Good evening, sirs and madam. A sample while you wait?”

“Thank you.” Alyce plucked a toothpick from the tray. She rolled her eyes at Sid and Amiri when they stared at her. “For energy.”

Sid backed away a few steps, pulling them with him.
“Would Jonah’s team have gone in without us? Against Thorne and how many tenebrae?”

“Not enough to spill out,” Alyce said reasonably. “Not enough to swamp our teshuva.”

Right. He was letting his dread run amok. He peered at Alyce. Despite her weakness, despite centuries of not knowing what had happened to her, her fear had always been for others—horror at what had happened around her, fear for what she might do. It had never been fear for herself.

Even now, after learning of the endless mission they faced, she met the challenges without flinching. She did not question, did not dither, did not hesitate.

She was everything he was not.

He was suddenly fiercely glad he had turned her away. If she felt the momentary pain of rejection, that was nothing compared to an eternity of dreading her bond to a man who feared even love.

A sharp whistle from across the pier distracted him. Nim balanced on the far railing, one hand braced on the deco lamppost beside her. Alyce was already on her way, Amiri behind her.

Sid fell into place. He should have taken one of the waiter’s toothpicks for a backup weapon. Thorne’s Saturday Night Special hardly made a dent at the small of his back where he’d shoved it into the waistband of his jeans. Encased in the round’s lead jacket, the splinter of the angelic relic wasn’t even a blip on his teshuva’s vigilant radar.

“Therese called,” Nim said without waiting for their questions. “A man identifying himself as a sewer inspector came by the diner. Nobody remembers him leaving. You see where this is going.”

“Thorne is down there,” Alyce said.

“Right. You win an all-expenses-paid trip to the demon realm.”

Beside Nim, Jonah shifted restlessly. “Pitch and Gavril are in the diner. They’ll run interference if any ferales are
drawn to the uproar. We can’t hide a full-scale demonic invasion, but we might prevent a few human deaths.” His expression was bleak.

“Where is everyone else?” Sid asked.

“En route. You four were closest.”

“We can’t wait,” Alyce said. She glanced at Sid. “Thorne isn’t like you. He isn’t patient or thoughtful. He’ll force the verge wider, whatever he has to do.”