Darkness Undone: A Novel of the Marked Souls (4 page)

In the absolute silence, he thought she’d left. The swish of blood through his ears resembled the echo of a mocking laugh, and he wished he’d just kept his mouth shut.

Finally she said, “You make my head hurt.”

If only he could see her. Not being able to judge her mood put him at a distinct disadvantage, which was not a place one wanted to be with the demon-ridden. “The tenebrae can kick my ass, and so can you, but I can at least induce headaches.”

A breath of air moved against his bare skin, as if she’d taken a few steps closer to him again. “You are not like me? I thought the restless spirits wanted you.”

“I’m not possessed by a teshuva as you are, no, but the
demons are drawn to dark emotions, and I’ve been … jet-lagged. The ferales would have made an in-flight snack of me if not for you.”

“It wasn’t just the … the ferales. … I don’t know what …” She blew out a frustrated breath. “It made me come to you, here.”

A Bookkeeper could serve in a league for decades before encountering a newly possessed talya in need of guidance. This wasn’t her teshuva’s virgin ascension, and yet in some ways she was even more innocent—erratic and deadly, but innocent.

And she was his.

Though the taste of her still lingered on his tongue, he tamped down the surge of possessiveness. He spackled over the improper craving with a more respectable crust of impersonal kindness. “I have much I can tell you.”

“Can you use fewer words?”

She’d come a little closer yet, judging from the volume of her voice. He’d never understood how someone could
hear
a smile, but in the lightless depths of wherever she’d dragged him, he imagined the relaxing of the tension in her vocal cords, the softening of her lips.

Her lips …

A skitter of nerves raced up his arms and down his spine, leaving evidence of its passage in the tiny prickling of goose bumps on his skin—his exposed-to-her-demonically-enhanced-vision skin. He breathed out slowly until the prickles subsided.

“I’ll try to keep it simple,” he said.

It was a good reminder. He was making a complication of his half nakedness when obviously she’d had no choice but to remove his shirt. While it had been some time since a woman had taken away any of his clothing—the last incident, he supposed, had been his laundress, taking in his dry cleaning—he shouldn’t read more into it.

Yet he wished he could remember her touch when she’d
removed his coat and shirt—for his notes, of course. Had she been rough or tentative? Aroused? He meant her teshuva; had it been ascendant at the time, or had her human emotions of compassion and sympathy guided her?

Any other sort of arousal was … incidental.

His shoulder was mangled but manageable, but he wanted to get to a dose of antibiotics. Although ichor might not kill him, the pathogens on a feralis carcass were nasty.

And he wanted to bring the girl with him, back to the @1 warehouse and the male talyan.

This was the chance of a lifetime—to witness the triggering of the long-extinct
symballein
bond between two talyan. What Bookkeeper wouldn’t risk an inconvenience like sepsis for such a chance? While the leagues held themselves aloof even from one another, Bookkeepers tried when possible to stay in closer contact to share insights, advance their mission—and claim bragging rights when it came to such amazing finds as this.

He hoped the hectic racing of his pulse didn’t scare the girl. “What shall I call you?”

“Hadn’t we agreed on damned?”

“A bit awkward to shout across the room at cocktail parties, don’t you think?”

“More words. Cocktail parties? I have yet to hear even one rooster in this city.”

“Rooster?” He swallowed the rest of the question. How long had she been possessed? Most talyan were reluctant to share their origin stories. That was one of the timeless complaints of Bookkeepers trying to keep accurate records. “At a cocktail party, the women wear flattering dresses, and the men drink too much. It’s not as much fun as it sounds.” He hesitated. “But if, for example, I wanted to leave a boring gathering and I wanted you to come with me, how would I call to you across the room?”

She whispered, so close to his ear that he jerked in surprise, “Call me Alyce.”

He squinted. Was she that paler patch of darkness? “I appreciate the rescue tonight, Alyce, but I need to get home.” Actually, he had a few intervening steps before getting back to London, but he didn’t need to bore her with his problems.

The charcoal shape in the black recoiled. “You can’t leave. You haven’t told me everything yet.”

“There’s a lot to tell, and it would be easier to explain if I could see you.” He tamped down the note of exasperation. “Plus, I could really use a shower.”

“A shower?”

He kept his face studiously blank. “A bath.” Maybe he couldn’t see, but she could, and he didn’t want his incredulity undermining their tenuous rapport.

“A bath …” Her drawn-out sigh was wistful this time, as if she were imagining the lap of water and bubbles on her skin. Hell, he’d gone only one nonstop flight without bathing, and he shared her yearning.

He did not mean “shared” as in sharing a bath. …

He tried to grab the thought, but it spun out of his control—Alyce, lithe and wet, dark hair streaming. … A ripple of shivery heat racked him. Could it be the beginnings of the infection, perhaps? “Antibiotics, acetaminophen, reality check,” he muttered. “Stat.”

Fingers danced across his forehead, her touch cool and fleeting. “You are speaking nonsense again. Are you fevered?”

“Yes.” He grasped the excuse even as he edged away from her hand. “Do you have my clothes?”

“Ruined. But here; your eyeglasses are in your pocket.” She pressed the frames into his palm. “I think nothing of mine will fit you.”

Now she had a sense of humor. He perched the specs on his nose, as if there were something to see besides darkness. “I just need to find a phone without being arrested for public indecency.” He’d turned down the league phone Liam
had offered. He needed to maintain a certain researcher-subject detachment, after all. It seemed unlikely he’d find a landline in Alyce’s lair.

“There is a box of phone very near here.”

“You can read?” Ah, and here he’d told himself he wouldn’t do incredulous.

“Not as much as you, I am sure.” A note of affront stiffened her tone. “But the letters on the side of the box are very large.”

He winced. “I didn’t mean—”

“Shall I take you there?”

“Please.”

He startled at a rusty groan and turned toward the rectangle of lesser-darkness that appeared in the black. She’d opened the door. The trickle of ambient light gave him hardly more information, but there wasn’t much to see, anyway.

Next to the mattress he lounged on, a fifteen-liter water jug, like the kind used to fill office water coolers, lay drained on its side. There was nothing else.

Alyce shifted in the doorway. “I have other retreats elsewhere. This was closest.”

Damn it again. He knew what had been on his face that time, without even the thin disguise of utter dark. “I’m glad you have a place to get away from the ferales.”

“I took this from one of them.”

For the first time, a smidgen of anger itched at the back of his jaws. A talya, dedicated to ridding the world of evil, was reduced to hiding in a feralis’s burrow? Where had the league been while she struggled with her demon and the passage of years?

She shifted to her other foot. “The devil didn’t need it anymore.”

His irritation dissolved at the defensiveness in her voice. Half-feral she might be, but she read his every fleeting emotion like the big letters on a phone booth. He gave her
an admiring grin, so she didn’t think he’d condemned the theft. “I’m sure it didn’t need more than a quick sweeping up once you were done with it.”

After a long moment, she smiled back, so quick he almost missed it. “Shall I help you dress?”

The hesitant smile touched him, making him realize that was as close as she should get. If he was going to label her as his control group in his emerging female talya study, he couldn’t get too involved. “I’m okay.”

He wasn’t, of course. In the end, she had to help him drape the shredded edges of his coat sleeve over his torn arm. He didn’t even bother with the shirt, instead just pressing the wet wad into his wound to catch any spillage.

She gazed at the blood-soaked rag. “Sometimes I can salvage the pieces.”

“Don’t bother. I have another.” He had several more, with access to as many as he chose to buy. He would seem fantastically fortunate to her.

And he was, now that he’d found a rogue female talya of his very own.

Contrary to what she’d said, the pay phone wasn’t “very near.” Alyce’s limp didn’t slow her, but a cold slick of sick sweat drenched Sid by the time they’d trekked halfway across the city. At last, the gas station appeared at the end of the block with the box on its steel post clearly labeled
PHONE
.

Sid reached for his wallet, but his hand found only his empty pocket. “Bloody hell.”

Alyce stiffened.

He gritted his teeth. She was like a beaten dog, flinching from a yell. Of course, she could rip his leg off and beat
him
with it if he was the sort to kick a dog. “I don’t suppose you have any money on you? A few coins, maybe?”

She stiffened even more, shoulders rounding, though he tried to sound curious rather than reproachful. But damn, it
had been a bad night—bad enough that he wasn’t going to be able to sulk back to the warehouse under his own power.

This left him only one choice.

He called the toll-free number. “Hugh, it’s Sid. I know it’s awfully early, but could you do me a favor—” He sighed as the line clicked over to another ring tone before he finished. The London @1 offices served as a finishing school of sorts for the eldest sons of Europe’s Bookkeepers, but the leagues’ heretofore strictly male definition of good manners hadn’t left room for secretarial charm. “No,” he muttered, “putting me through to the Bookkeeper was really not the favor I wanted to ask.”

“Sidney?”

Sid closed his eyes and reminded himself that routing the call through London kept him from the trouble of having to make a collect call to the Chicago league. Since he wasn’t entirely sure they’d accept the charges, it would be easier just to deal with the usual disapproval.

“Hullo, Dad.” His father would be at the big mahogany desk with the matching credenza that weighted the room toward Learned Respectability. It was the crack of dawn in London, but his father would be sitting at that desk, which faced away from the gorgeous panorama of the Thames—no sense getting distracted by the view. “How’s the weather?”

Over the phone came the thin creak of a chair spinning in place. “Foggy, but not as cold as Chicago.”

Sid opened his eyes. Alyce stared down the street away from him. In her thin shift, now minus most of the skirt, she must be freezing. But the only thing less gentlemanly than letting her freeze would be handing her his wadded tweed and bleeding out at her bare feet. “You were right about the cold. Speaking of your being right, I’m in a bit of a bind.”

“I’ll wire you money for the return flight.”

Sid tightened his grip on the phone. The pressure
twanged across to his wounded shoulder. “Nothing so drastic. I just need Hugh to make a call for me.”

“Where is your—? Never mind. What’s the number?”

“It’s nothing you need to bother with, Dad. Hugh can—”

“The number?”

The tension crawled back up Sid’s spine to gather at the base of his skull as he rattled off the @1 Chicago phone number. Thank God he’d always been good at memorizing. “If you could ask Niall to send a car to the corner of Ontario and LaSalle, I’d appreciate it.”

“What sort of trouble are you in?”

“Dad, I’ve been here less than forty-eight hours. How bad could it be?” Before his father could enumerate, Sid countered, “How are you doing?”

“I’ve been here more than seventy years, Sidney. How bad could it be?”

The dry amusement in his father’s voice made Sid shut his eyes again. And this time he saw only the empty black. “Right then. I’ll check in again later.”

“Most likely I’ll be here.” The rasp of the chair grated through the wires again. “Be careful, Sidney.”

“I am, Dad. Take care.”

Sid waited until the line disconnected before he hung up.

“Your father is sick,” Alyce said.

“I know.”

“Then why are you here?”

“Because my father is sick.” If the talya could hear cancer over a long-distance call, she could certainly guess from the tone of his voice that she shouldn’t ask anything more. “He is my father, but he is also master of my guild. Bookkeeper knowledge passes from father to son to limit our exposure to the general public, but I still need to show him that I’m worth … that I’ve earned my Bookkeeper mastery.”

“My master died long ago.”

Sid sank down to the sidewalk below the phone. He tipped his head back against the steel post and stared up at the night sky, bleached old-bone gray by the light pollution of the city. Suddenly, he didn’t care to poke into her history any more than he cared to poke into the crevice between the slabs of concrete. Yet his damnable curiosity twinged. “How long ago?”

“It’s hard to remember,” she said.

Sid had read what little information existed on rogues. Psychosis among talyan—unmanageable psychosis, to be precise—happened more than the leagues cared to document. When the etheric energies of a demon’s ascension weren’t balanced, the newly possessed human slid quickly into insanity. Rogues typically came to bad ends. They wandered off in confusion or flamed out in a fury of tenebrae slaughter.

How would Liam Niall and the rest of the Chicago talyan respond to a rogue in their midst? Certainly they had enough borderline personalities to make room on the fringes for one more. Alyce couldn’t keep wandering the streets alone.

Never mind that she’d been doing just that for … how long exactly?

Sid pushed himself upright. He hadn’t realized he’d slumped sideways against the telephone pole. He was seeping good manners along with his blood. But maybe she hadn’t gotten the reserved-silence memo since she missed the new-talya welcome seminar. “What bits do you remember?”