She could keep him to herself. She’d never had anything, but he was here, in her hands. The whispering little voice that moved through her usually suggested she destroy things. She liked this idea much better.
Possessed, she might be, but now she possessed him.
“I have a place,” she said. “A place we can get warm.” If she could just remember where she’d put it.
He nodded. “Take me there.”
Yes, she wanted that very much.
Bookkeepers traditionally stayed out of fieldwork. A Bookkeeper couldn’t hope to survive demonic fieldwork since that entailed mostly killing fields.
Bookkeeper traditions survived for centuries because good practice kept good practitioners alive. Not indefinitely, of course—they weren’t talyan, after all—but it kept them alive long enough to pass along the traditions and lessons.
The importance of institutional survival had been battered into Sid’s brain. But when Alyce had grabbed his hand on the warehouse steps, he’d tossed aside everything he’d been taught—all that generations of Bookkeepers had collected—to put his empty hand in hers.
Impulsive? Not at all. It was an opportunity for in-depth study that could upend everything those previous Bookkeepers had held infallible.
Now he wondered if he’d been a tad hasty.
“Not much farther,” she said.
He was numb all the way through, which was better than feeling the pain. Thank God he’d put on his loafers before he left his room with her, but he hadn’t bothered with socks, and now he couldn’t feel his toes.
A few lost toes were a small price to pay for the inner workings of a rogue female talya. He just wished the inner workings were less outdoors in Chicago in October.
When he’d suggested grabbing a cab, she’d just looked through him. “How will I know where we are going?”
He didn’t have his wallet anyway.
The city blocks stretched endlessly between traffic lights, and the relentless flow of traffic seemed at the same time more menacing and more remote when he realized he had once again foolishly left the security of the warehouse with nothing—no money, no cell phone, no one who knew where he was, nothing to protect himself.
Except Alyce, of course.
Though she might be most dangerous of all.
She gave a little cry. “There. I remembered.”
He followed her gaze. “The art museum?”
“Almost.”
She dragged him onward.
But she didn’t take him up the elevated walkway that led from the autumn-browned expanse of Millennium Park to the Art Institute of Chicago. Instead, she flanked the sprawling Beaux-Arts building and dragged him down to where the upper gallery spanned a set of railroad tracks.
They had to climb over the low concrete railing and jump down to the roof of a parked truck. His shoulder screamed at the abuse. But when he stumbled, Alyce caught him.
“So cold,” she murmured. “Just another moment.”
She led him along the tracks, past the unmarked doors at the base of the museum buildings. Light leaked under both ends of the suspended gallery above them, but they were blocked from casual view.
At a panel in the wall, just another slab of gray, she slammed her fist against the metal. The panel popped free, revealing a square of darkness.
Sid restrained a sigh. What was wrong with the nice museum café upstairs?
“It’s a good place,” Alyce said, as if she’d heard him. “The devils never come here.”
He lingered outside the hole. “They don’t like the art.”
“What I can see through the new windows is very odd.”
He stifled a laugh. He’d read about the museum’s expansion. “So you don’t like modern art?”
She faced him. “I am old.”
His amusement faded. “Art, old or new, has a nullifying effect on the tenebrae. Given the choice, the horde avoids humanity’s heartfelt attempt to make sense of its place in the cosmos.”
“Is that what art does?”
“And the good stuff looks nice above a couch.” He peered into the dark. “I don’t suppose you have a couch in there.”
“I have candles.”
“Sounds great.” He climbed through the open hatchway, and she pulled the panel into place behind them.
It wasn’t as bad as her last bolt-hole. Once she lit the candles with a half-used book of matches, the empty nook looked downright … empty. But it was dry, and a boiler vent protruding from one wall shared its heat. Dry, warm, and tenebrae-free was good.
She stood at his side, her gaze darting from him to the stark walls and back again, fingers laced tight in front of her. “I kept food here, but it has been a while. And I just drink from the fountain across the street. I could bring you some. …” Fingers still interlaced, she opened her palms into a shallow cup. Her eyes, when she looked up at him, were clouded.
He put his hand over hers, filling the cup. “I’m fine.” He folded his legs under him and gently tugged her down to his side. “I just want to rest a moment.”
She collapsed in slow degrees to rest on one hip, and the granny dress gulped her in its wrinkles.
Sid didn’t blame Ecco for the crude, backward compliment about the housedress. For everything it lacked—style, shape, thread count—it only emphasized Alyce’s delicate features. In the flicker of the candle, the washed-out blue polyester highlighted the color of her eyes, like the shadows in an iceberg. The hem covered her down to her bare toes, and Sid steeled himself against the urge to tuck the edges more tightly around her, maybe gallantly remove his shirt to drape around her thin shoulders.
But stripping again would hurt so much, he’d look more pitiful than gallant. And anyway, a scholar should probably avoid taking his clothes off around his test subject. Nakedness led to feeling, and feeling led diametrically away from thinking, and thinking was all a Bookkeeper had.
It was ironic that even though he’d lost the two most important women in his life because of Bookkeeping, this third had come to him for the same reason.
Alyce looked back into his eyes until he realized the silence had lengthened unnecessarily. He’d never encountered a talya with such stillness. Even the restless demonic energies that a human sensed only through a primitive, tingling awareness of lurking danger were banked in her, as if the teshuva slept. Would her underachiever teshuva explain the limp he’d first noticed in the alley?
“Alyce, how did you stay alive?”
“The fountain,” she reminded him. “It’s very close. And I found a carton of bruised apples once.”
“I don’t mean food and drink.” Although that had obviously been in short enough supply. “Did you have others with you before? Others like you? Who taught you how to overcome the tenebrae? Who …” He trailed off as she shook her head. “No one?”
“Not until you.”
“How long?”
The slow shake of her head ceased, and her gaze went through him. “Long.”
The depth of wistfulness in the one word made his chest ache as if he’d held his breath. “I wish your introduction to the league had been …”
One corner of her mouth tilted just a bit. “Less bloody?”
“Well, with the talyan, that’s not so much an issue.”
“Tell me about them. About me.” She leaned toward him, so that the point of her shoulder pressed into his arm. Though his stitches were on his other side, the trusting contact was almost sharper than a feralis fang. Had he botched her reunion? After what had happened to Ecco, would Liam brand her an unrepentant rogue?
He laid out the story like the worst of the unvarnished Old World fairy tales: the battle between good and evil; the teshuva who had been on the wrong side of that battle and repented; the djinn, who’d lost but not repented and not given up either, whipping the lesser evils of the horde-tenebrae into endless, subversive mayhem; the angels and demons—repentant and malevolent—that continued the fight, unacknowledged by humans, except for the few resonant souls who unwittingly brought the etheric forces into their lives that changed them forever.