But there was no one around.
No one at all.
His heel scuffed the pavement as his steps slowed. The soft scrape repeated down the throat of the dank alley off to his right. He swallowed in disgust at the stench of stewed trash. Really, that costume shop should try bottling the stink for a gag gift—emphasis on gag.
He peered back toward the intersection where the cab had almost sideswiped him. The red flash of brakes and illuminated crosswalk signs blinked with ordinary, reassuring liveliness, but in that moment, bustling humanity seemed strangely far away.
Distance was good. Distance put things in perspective; letting Niall’s snub provoke him had been stupid. Well, he’d blame the jet lag and be his own composed Bookkeeper self on the morrow.
Before he could take another step, a disfigured shadow charged out of the alley toward him in a blur of grizzled fur and scabrous gray skin.
Pinched together on a ratlike head, the feralis’s bulbous eyes raged with an unholy orange flame. Its tapered jaws gaped wide to expose finger-length incisors. Curiously, the fangs looked sharper on the rubber version. …
Sid stumbled back. Adrenaline soaked through him in a hot wash like thin, bitter coffee.
Told you so, said his hindbrain.
He turned to run, but the feralis sprang at him, fiendishly quick on its clawed feet. Its jaws sank into his left shoulder. The shock was literal as well as academic when the teeth sliced through the heavy wool tweed of his coat, into muscle, and—judging by the unpleasant grinding noise—all the way through to bone.
“Bloody hell!” Agony spiked above the adrenaline—the archives never footnoted how much a feralis bite hurt!—and his vision narrowed to brick and blood and darkness.
The feralis shook him once, twice, snapping his head back as if he were nothing more than a chew toy. His spectacles flew off—now the brick, blood, and darkness were blurry—and his spine twisted with a searing streak of pain.
He flailed with his free arm, and something damp crumpled under his fist. Had he smacked its rotting gums? Or its eyeball? His stomach heaved. The talyan never reported squeamishness. Was that a result of indifference or pride?
The rest of him heaved too as the feralis tossed him toward the alley. He hit the pavement and bounced. The brutal blow to his shoulder jolted the breath from him and condensed his vision to a single bloody point.
The red dot winked out. And reappeared. And multiplied to a hundred tiny glittering points. Malice eyes split the darkness like crimson open wounds, not fuzzy at all, despite his nearsightedness. The smoldering, oily smoke of a salambe threaded past the crimson like an evil party streamer.
There were certain times when being a bit on the dim side would be preferable.
Night air leached through the hole in his coat, but he wasn’t cold. Between the alarming slick of blood matting the tweed and the singe of the feralis’s poisoned bite, he was feeling almost stuffy.
Of course, Bookkeepers were often accused of being stuffy. His father had countered, saying a Bookkeeper was duty-bound to replace nonsensical emotions with the quest for understanding.
As if understanding the inevitability made it any easier to die.
The feralis snapped at a second tenebrae crowding in. Two more of the tenebrae skittered behind them on spidery legs. The mutant quartet shuffled closer, and the air between the brick walls thickened with the stench of decay until Sid’s eyes watered.
Bloody marvelous. Now the talyan would find his mangled corpse with tears on his cheeks. Maybe sheer mortification at their comparative weakness was why Bookkeepers were tutored past emotion.
The pain in his shoulder spread in paralyzing waves, but his right hand still worked. He scrabbled along the asphalt for a loose brick, an empty bottle, maybe a rocket launcher. But only pebbles and bits of glass rolled under his desperate fingertips. Not even a dustbin to shelter behind. What sort of evil city kept its alleys so tidy?
“Don’t fight, lads,” he choked out. How many times had his father chided him with those words? “Run along now.”
“They must fight.”
The voice—barely a whisper behind him—jerked him around with the force of sharper teeth sunk into his flesh.
From the deepest pool of shadows, a girl, clothed in nothing more than a once-white shift, coalesced like a mist in front of his straining eyes. Her thin arms were bare, and she held herself so tightly, her fingers chased the last of the blood from her skin.
Her hair fell in loose waves over her face and past her shoulders. Between the dark strands, her gaze—eerily pale—was hazy, and a distracted frown arrowed in one line between her arched brows. She took a limping step forward.
What was she doing in the empty alley? Doing drugs or a john? If her moral compass was as unsteady as her steps, she’d be an easy target for the tenebrae evil. He tried to pull himself toward her, and his fingers closed over the smooth frames of his spectacles.
He jerked them on, crookedly. At least now he could see his oncoming demise.
“Get out of here,” he hissed. He wouldn’t let another innocent die because once again he’d been in the wrong place at a bad time. Whatever or whoever she’d been doing, she didn’t deserve this. “Go. Now!”
For a heartbeat, her eyes cleared, but it was like winter clouds clearing the night sky to reveal a moon icy, distant, and dead. “Go where?”
“Away.” Fear for her congealed in his throat until he could barely push out the words. “Just go.”
Her pale gaze lifted to the ferales. “They have to fight. I have to fight too.”
If the feralis attack had been a blur, the girl was a lightning bolt.
One moment she was far enough down the alley that he thought she had a chance to escape. In his next breath, she was amidst the ferales. Her skirt fluttered behind her as she ducked between the two spidery tenebrae, avoiding the stabs of their spearlike legs with artless grace despite her limp.
Shrieking, the salambe shot up in a tight spiral out of the alley. All the malice swarmed after it, like incorporeal rats in the wake of a sinking ship.
That couldn’t be a good sign.
God, she wasn’t even half their size, and she was so thin, the ferales would snap through her in one unsatisfying bite. She could have gained an inch or two if she had at least been wearing shoes.
He surged upright, determined to throw himself into the fray beside her.
With a roundhouse kick, she slammed her foot into his head and knocked him to the ground again. This might have ticked him off, except his spectacles stayed on this time, so he had a clear view of the feralis that launched over her and landed right where he would have been, had he still been standing.
From his sprawl, he slammed his trainers at the feralis. At least he wasn’t wearing tasseled loafers, which his father claimed awarded Bookkeepers a proper visual distinction from the booted talyan.
The feralis hopped sideways with a hiss. From its jaws, slaver dripped, backlit yellow from the streetlights. Those fangs were looking sharper by the second.
The girl grabbed the creature by its fleshy tail and hauled it backward. The lean muscles in her bare arms quivered as the feralis bawled, spraying sulfurous drool. If Sid hadn’t known better, he would have said the tenebrae was … afraid. Its claws peeled up curls of asphalt, but it could not resist her relentless force. Her irises gleamed violet.
Sid sucked in a shocked breath. She wasn’t human either.
What astounding luck! His first night in Chicago, and he’d found a female talya. She wasn’t associated with the league, or Niall would have mentioned her. She must be newly possessed—and unconstrained by the knowledge and rules of the league culture. A tabula rasa, ready for imprinting.