Sera had left a pill bottle of analgesics by his bedside, and he dry-swallowed a tight fistful. It was not the recommended dosage, but the FDA had never anticipated off-label use as anti–demon spit painkiller.
He kicked off his filthy jeans and eased out of his shirt. He noted the bloodstains from his draining wound, and suddenly he had a better understanding of the league’s rather shocking clothing allowance. Standing in his boxers, he wrapped his shoulder in gauze, then crawled into bed with a groan. The sagging middle where the springs had sprung sucked him down.
But sleep circled in the same way his inbound flight had gone endlessly round O’Hare, so he grabbed his specs and pulled one of his favorite books into his lap. His father hadn’t been thrilled to part with the illuminated texts, but Sid had convinced him the opportunity to study female talyan with original manuscripts in hand superseded jurisdictional pettiness.
He donned archival gloves in deference to the old man and the old paper and hoped if he fell asleep he wouldn’t drool on the pages.
From somewhere on the street outside, a truck honked, but through the gray concrete walls, the cacophony of the industrial district was more distant than a dream, as if the real world weren’t allowed to intrude on this demonic sanctuary.
His churning thoughts slowed. No wonder the talyan clung so tightly to their monastic seclusion. Personality studies indicated that disconnection from close human relationships made a person more vulnerable to demonic possession, so statistically more talyan would display antisocial behaviors. But the real reprieve wasn’t the teshuva’s escape from hell; it was the talya’s freedom from the tyranny of meddlesome life.
With league training and Bookkeeper tricks, the talyan stiff-armed death and life for the sake of their mission.
No wonder no right-thinking, right-souled woman would have them.
He and the talyan had more in common than he’d appreciated.
Eventually, his eyelids drooped. Through the haze of his eyelashes, the intricately drawn illustrations danced with strange wildlife, a tangle of angels and demons without clear distinction. That was probably true for most people—at least for those who’d avoided possession by some force more definitively aligned.
He blamed his gritty eyes for making him blink dumbly when he looked up and saw the visitation, as if one of the ethereal figures from the primeval text had stepped off the page, a fever dream come to life. He fumbled his drooping specs higher. “Alyce?”
She ghosted across the room, her bare feet silent on the linoleum despite the slight hitch in her gait. Through the dark curtain of her tangled hair, her pale eyes glittered, amethyst over ice. “Shh. I’ve come to free you.”
A ping raced through his body, from the sudden acceleration of his heartbeat to his extremities, like a warning signal. “Free me?” He pushed the book aside, careful not to wrinkle the pages. “Did Liam let you in?”
“There was a devil-man at the gate.” She fisted her hands in her skirt. The grandmotherly housedress lacked the ichor stains of her last ensemble, but the powder blue polyester was worn to near transparency in places. And now—this wasn’t a good sign—there were fingerprints of blood in the folds. “I did not stop to ask his name, but I saw the devil in his eyes.”
The ping went round his innards a few more times, gaining particle-accelerator speeds. Had she killed Liam or one of the other talyan? That would put a wrinkle in his reintroduction strategy. “They are possessed,” he admitted, “but not by devils—or not evil devils, anyway. Their teshuva—the demons inside them—are like yours.”
“Evil,” she whispered. “Like me.”
“Repentant,” he corrected. “Fighting for the light now.”
“There is no light for me.”
“Not before, maybe. But now that you’re here, everything is different.”
She pressed her bloody palms together and raised her hands until her fingertips brushed under her chin. Despite the prayerful pose, her gaze speared him without mercy. “Is this where I die?”
He recoiled. “God, no!”
“Won’t you banish the devil from me?”
“I can’t.”
Her hands fell back to her sides, and she averted her face. The reven around her neck guttered with a few violet lights, then faded to black, as if her teshuva hadn’t the strength to maintain its outrage.
But she had incapacitated at least one of the talya to get this far. What was she?
Slowly, keeping his eye on her, he climbed out of the bed. His navy boxers weren’t suitable for an audience with the Queen, but he wasn’t indecent.
Alyce stood back, showing no signs of bolting. Instead, her gaze flicked back to him, touching on the gauze at his shoulder, the bruise on his forehead, and various contusions in between. “Were you badly hurt?”
He gave a one-sided shrug, sparing his wounded shoulder. “They were able to patch me up here, so it can’t have been too bad. It would have been awkward at the hospital to explain the bite pattern.”
“Don’t. They won’t believe you.”
His fingers itched for a pen and paper. “You’ve tried? When?”
“I don’t quite remember.” Her wintery gaze darkened. “It did not end well.”
That reminded him about the talya at the gate. “We need to go pick up the pieces of the welcoming party you left in the dust.”
“He was rude.”
“That happens with talyan. But you still shouldn’t break them.”
She nodded. “I did not understand they were yours.”
He halted in the middle of grabbing his jeans. The Chicago talyan? His? Hardly. He was a loaner, not a keeper; they’d made that clear. But he didn’t want them either. He wanted London. Hopefully not until well in the future, when his father retired to putter around his garden.
Alyce was watching his face, her expression mirroring the furrow of his brows. “I’ve saddened you. But I had to come to you, and he was in the way.”
He smoothed a hand down his face, erasing the quick, helpless calculations of his father’s chances of surviving till spring, much less retirement. “You didn’t make me sad. In fact, I can’t possibly explain how happy I am to have you here. There’s so much we can learn together.”
He stepped into his jeans, wishing she weren’t watching quite so closely, but intrigued by her empathic responses. How could a talya—endlessly driven by the teshuva to the farthest reaches of violence and destruction—keep any semblance of softer emotion and not go mad? Had the symballein link evolved precisely to provide an outlet for the emotions? For the madness?
What a spectacular find. Or, more to the point, how spectacular that she’d found him.
He had a half second to wonder how exactly she’d found him, when she reached out and flattened her palm over his belly, just above the unbuttoned fly of his jeans.
CHAPTER 5
Alyce held her hand against Sid’s warm skin, though he sucked in a harsh breath to pull away.
She had never touched a man of her own will. She knew she should not touch him now. But now was all she had. He was all she had.
The textures of him tingled in her fingertips: the smooth planes of his flanks where hard sheets of muscle wrapped around into his rippled abdomen; the thin line of hair that connected the shadowed indent of his navel to the darker mysteries behind the button of his pants. …
“You are real.” The icy places between her bones softened in relief, and she swayed closer. She had not imagined him. He was wounded, but alive. Here, now. And oh-so warm. “Not one of my delusions.” She canted her head to gaze up into his eyes—eyes the same dusty brown as the leather of the book laid on his bed. “You won’t disappear?”